Minister Practices What She Preaches

Her Gospel Is `Success`

And for the moment, after nearly 30 years of preaching prosperity and dispensing morsels of metaphysical philosophy from her pulpit on the city`s South Side, Rev. Colemon is standing tall and striding confidently toward a promising tomorrow.

She has long been one of America`s least conventional ministers, vigorously proclaiming a gospel of health and wealth and reincarnation. And now Rev. Colemon is emerging as one of the nation`s most celebrated clerics as well, boasting of a membership exceeding 10,000 at her Christ Universal Temple, an expanding syndicated television ministry and a $6.7 million religious edifice and headquarters in the final stages of construction. The complex, at 119th Street and Ashland Avenue, will open with a series of dedication services in the week of Aug. 18.

``I have earned it,`` Rev. Colemon declared firmly during an interview at the hulking new building, one of the city`s largest worship centers, with a 3,500-seat sanctuary and a separate 470-seat chapel. ``Success speaks for itself.``

Success is, of course, a watchword for Rev. Colemon, who practices without apology the epistle of self-esteem and material indulgence she advocates for her followers.

``Many people condemn a minister for having things,`` she said. ``It`s the old concept that the poorer you are, the closer you are to God.``

That is hangdog heresy to Rev. Colemon, who lives in a 23-room Hyde Park estate with her aged mother and employs a maid and personal valet. Her garage houses a white limousine and a yellow Cadillac Fleetwood. Her jewelry is expensive and meant to be seen.

``I go first class,`` she said. ``Money is God in action. God is the source of my supply. I demonstrate the prosperity I teach about by having money in my pocket, money in my bank account and material things. Nothing`s wrong with money.``

However, the bullishly promulgated doctrine of financial blessings and money-market salvation accounts for only part of the broadening appeal of Rev. Colemon`s ``New Thought`` religious empire, which includes her Chicago congregation, the Johnnie Colemon Institute and the Universal Foundation for Better Living Inc., an alliance of 19 churches in the U.S., Canada, South America and the West Indies.

Adherents, many of them young professional black women, are attracted by the charismatic and commanding presence of Rev. Colemon, who instructs her listeners weekly to fill their minds with ``positive thoughts`` and to heed the laws and principles she has drawn from both the Bible and metaphysics.

``You need not be the victim of circumstances--you can be the victor,``

she explained. ``People come here because they`re tired of being broke, tired of being sick, tired of being unhappy, tired of the old way of living.

``This place exists as an invitation to black people to be what you want to be without depending on anybody but the indwelling God-presence in you.``

Rev. Colemon said she achieved her own spiritual emancipation in 1953, when she was told she was dying of an unspecified ``incurable disease`` and left her public school teaching assignment in Chicago to enroll at the Unity School of Christianity outside Kansas City, Mo. There she was instructed that disease is the result of ``negative`` thinking and a wounded self-image. She also came to believe that orthodox Christianity has warped the teachings of Jesus and invented the traditional doctrine of heaven and hell.

On her return to Chicago, freshly ordained, she founded the Christ Unity Temple in 1956 and built it as a showplace for the international Unity movement until withdrawing from that association in 1979, changing the congregation`s name and establishing her own nondenominational religious alliance.

In addition, her weekly television program, titled ``Better Living with Johnnie Colemon,`` is broadcast in 10 cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Atlanta.

The current budget for her burgeoning enterprise is more than $10 million, up from $5.5 million only two years ago.

It has been, she conceded, a breathtaking and improbable turn of events for someone who grew up in Columbus, Miss., and whose deepest childhood ambitions centered on playing the saxophone in a jazz band or dancing in a chorus line on Broadway.

``I wanted to be on stage,`` she recalled. ``I never had any thought of being a minister.``

But in the all-important now, Rev. Colemon is at center stage of the universe in which she travels. She is despised by many black ministers who complain that she lures their own congregants with the promise of guilt-free material and emotional luxuries. But she is showered with homage by the converts she has made.

She has been twice widowed, and has struggled through the agony of ridicule and criticism that comes her way, revisiting her like what she said were the occasional flashes of memory from an earlier incarnation as an

``Egyptian princess.``

Her new-age spiritual formula, she insisted, is the seed for a harvest of productive and proud religionists, who join Rev. Colemon in blissfully chanting the mantra of her movement: ``I am beautiful. I am perfect. I am whole. Because God is, I am.``